The Electronic Discovery Institute (EDI), a non-profit devoted to e-discovery issues, ran into a snag while conducting an in-depth study on the effectiveness of computer-assisted document review in 2007. The study required participating software vendors to load a control set of data onto their systems to benchmark the effectiveness of their products. However, each participant required unique load file formats for its proprietary platforms.
“The EDI team spent four months and more than $15,000 to structure data in a format that was acceptable
to the study participants’ database platform,” says Patrick Oot, director of e-discovery at Verizon and a member of EDI’s advisory board. “Had the software providers been able to ingest a standardized data set, EDI would have saved significant resources.”
